Apart from being a major add-in board (AIB) partner for AMD's ATI Radeon and FirePro lines of graphics products, Sapphire is also a notable motherboard manufacturer that has been using chipsets by ATI for several generations of platforms now. Its latest offering is the DDR3-supportive Pure CrossFireX 790GX AM3 motherboard. It has been spotted at a Japanese store, where it was priced at 18,980 JPY (around 192.5 USD).

Based on the AMD 790GX + SB750 chipset, the motherboard features an AM3 CPU socket. Four DDR3 DIMMs provide support for up to 16 GB of DDR3 memory. A 5+1 phase CPU power circuit is present. Heatpipe based cooling spreads heat between the northbridge and VRM heatsinks. The southbridge gets its own small heatsink. Two PCI-Express x16 slots are provided, which arrange as electrically x8, x8 when both are populated. The motherboard lacks onboard lane switching logic, and relies on a switch card that has to be installed on the second PCI-E x16, for the first one to provide all its 16 lanes to the installed graphics card. The motherboard features a Radeon HD 3300 class IGP with dedicated 128 MB of DDR3 sideport memory. Audio-routed HDMI, DVI and D-Sub connectors are provided onboard.

i just dont get why they'd put a sideport onboard video, on a full ATX board, especially a crossfire one?

If it was mATX, sure... but not ATX.

editt: it feels like a timwarp back to the DFI nforce 4 days - using a video card in either slot blocks smaller ones (why isnt the PCI-E 1x above the top PCI-E slot?) and extra molex power needed to the board (see above top video slot)

This board just seems weird, its like the latest tech with an outdated board design.

yeah for a back up but most people like us have a cheap or real old backup card and anyway you can use the onboard graphics chip as a backup perfectly fine without sideport memory it just uses system memory instead

needless to say without a dedicated graphics card the sideport memory is usefull and probly goot on matx or pico but not full sized atx wich has crossfire as a feature meaning the intend you to have 2 dedicated cards

i thought the gpu could use the memory in game or i could see it being usefull if you only wanted the onboard to run and the graphics card could shut down to save power and noise/heat